No Dark Valley

by Jamie Langston Turner

  To which Bruce replied, also addressing Madison, “Tell Mommy that Uncle Brucie catches her dark cryptic meaning and that he likes her clever analogy with the peas but that he’s not ready yet to try again, okay, cupcake?”

  Well, here he was still standing in the middle of the backyard looking up at the blue sky. He’d better get going on these leaves. No time to be thinking about women or groping for words to capture a certain color. He started the blower. Lately he had been doing things like this more and more—getting all ready to do something, then stopping before he even got started and staring off into space, often because he was trying to think of the most precise word to describe some sight or sound. It sounded like something an old person would do, or a boring introvert.

  He had been so inspired by the beauty of fall this year that he had even sat down and tried writing out an entire paragraph of description one Sunday afternoon recently, just to see if he could. He sat outdoors to do it, right outside his apartment door at Kimberly’s patio table. The paragraph wasn’t bad, really. He read it over and over, both silently and aloud, revising it a little each time. He was really struggling with the sky part, though, searching for an adjective that never did come to him and still hadn’t.

  He even went upstairs while Kimberly and Madison were napping in the den and looked through the big shoebox where Kimberly kept crayons for Madison to scribble with. Sometimes those labels on crayons had just the right word: thistle pink, adobe orange, pine green, buttercream yellow. He sifted through them, past mulberry red and frosty gray, past plum purple and mahogany brown, until he spotted a tip of blue exactly the color he wanted. He dug it out, held it up, and read: sky blue. So much for any help there. He looked up to see Kimberly standing in the doorway of the nursery, sleepy-eyed and puzzled. “You want a coloring book, too, Brucie?” she asked.

  As he moved up along the side of the backyard now, Bruce remembered how he had worked out regular arrangements with girls in high school and college to write his papers for him. So how did it happen, he wondered, that he was just now starting to discover something satisfying about putting words down on paper, manipulating the order and fitting them together? He wondered if he could have been a writer if he had started earlier. He was always wondering if he could have been this or that if he had chosen to try. That was the trouble with life—you didn’t have time to try everything.

  He loved his teaching job and had no intention of changing jobs, but he couldn’t help wondering about other fields, such as medicine, for instance. He had always enjoyed the channel on television that showed real operations in progress, and he had often pictured himself as the surgeon, removing a tumor here, cauterizing a bleeding ulcer there, performing delicate heart surgery, transplanting a liver, reattaching a severed hand.

  And whenever he flipped past the Antiques Road Show on television, he paused to wonder what it would be like to be able to tell people the history behind their treasures and trinkets, to assign an exact price to a vase or a figurine right on the spot. When he watched the dog shows on television, he imagined being the judge for Best in Show, examining the dogs’ teeth, confidently placing his hands on their haunches, telling the trainers to take them around one more time, then pointing at the winner and saying with assurance, “That one—the Kerry blue terrier. He’s the best.”

  He had mused over all kinds of jobs—photographer, chef, architect, automobile designer, sportscaster, auctioneer, veterinarian, pilot, criminal investigator, on and on. Cinema had always fascinated him, also. In high school and college, though, he had decided he’d rather star in a movie than be on the technical end directing or filming, and he had even taken a couple of acting classes as electives, in which he had done quite well. But a writer—now that seemed a cut above most of the others.

  Since he had added the role of drama coach to his teaching load at Berea Middle School, he was always thinking of ideas for new plays, though as of yet he hadn’t gotten around to developing any of them. Maybe he should consider trying to write an article sometime for one of the area newspapers, maybe a short piece about good places to hike or the benefits of drama in the middle school. He was sure he could write as well as some of the people who wrote for the Derby Daily News and the Filbert Nutshell. He had read an article with Celia’s by-line on it back in the spring sometime, something about an unsolved local murder, and it was far more interesting and a lot better than most of the others. Maybe if he ever wrote something and got it printed, Celia would see it and strike up a conversation with him about it.

  Something caught his eye, and he looked up to see Kimberly standing on the patio waving a bright red dish towel. He turned off the leaf blower. “I’m making stroganoff,” she called to him. “You want to eat with us?” Though she was a good fifty feet away, he thought she looked a little tired. She had stopped waving the towel and was standing with one fist pressed into her ribs as if easing a pain. It only made sense, though. Carrying another person around inside you had to add some physical stress to your life. She had put on quite a bit of weight with this baby and still had almost three months to go.

  Bruce pretended to consider. “But that would mean saving my sliced ham on rye for another day.”

  She nodded. “Another day, another sandwich. It’ll keep.” She glanced up at the nursery window. “Maddy should be awake any time. I’m surprised she’s not already, with all that racket you’re making. I thought we’d eat around six or so.”

  Bruce wondered if Kimberly was on to something new—trying to plan her day according to a schedule. That would be a real switch. But he wasn’t going to criticize if she was offering him a home-cooked meal. He looked at his watch. It was a little past four-thirty. He’d be there right at six, he told her. If somebody had tried to tell him five years ago that one day before he turned forty his plans for a Friday evening would include nothing more than eating stroganoff with his sister and niece, he would have laughed.

  He turned the leaf blower back on. Another hour and he could be finished with both the back and front yards. The front yard wasn’t much bigger than his flag of Qatar, thanks to the large island of mulched azaleas and monkey grass Kimberly had planted in the middle. Of course, while the island cut down on his time when mowing the lawn, it actually complicated the leaf-blowing job unless he just blew the leaves up under the bushes, which was what he might do today.

  As he continued his work, he thought about the play he had recently begun rehearsing with the drama club at school. It was quite an ambitious undertaking—an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that he had trimmed and customized for young actors. When he had announced to the kids after the fall play—a silly shallow drama called Humpty Dumpty and the Pack Rats—that they would be preparing something by Shakespeare for March, a great yowl of protest had gone up.

  But he had pretended to be amazed and a little scornful at their response, telling them they were acting like the little mush minds everyone accused them of being and telling them that of all the plays he had ever been in, his high school role as Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream was his very favorite. He promised them they’d like it if they’d just give it a try, and already most of them were coming around. One of the loudest objectors, a boy named DeReese Pascoe, who had lobbied for a rap drama about rival gangs in Chicago, was trying hard not to show how delighted he was with his role as Puck.

  * * *

  Bruce thought about how proud his grandmother had been when she had come to see him as Oberon in the high school play. Neither of his parents had come because his father had taken sick by then and his mother wouldn’t leave his side. Though he knew he had performed well for a high school kid, his grandmother had acted like he was Sir Laurence Olivier. When she had died two years ago, he had lost his most enthusiastic cheerleader.

  But he didn’t want to let himself think about his grandmother now because that always led to thinking about his mother. He had loved them both, but in such different ways. In his childhood, his mother had been
the sun around which his little planet orbited and his grandmother a bright but distant moon. Over time their roles had reversed. And eventually they had both become falling stars, though in the end his grandmother’s glow had been by far the steadier of the two. She had outlived her own daughter by a full year, sitting up with her day and night during that last week.

  He disliked thinking about what time had done to them both, but that’s the way it was. His mother had turned her back on life, changed from an angel to a harpy, and his grandmother, though she embraced life, couldn’t do anything about getting old and weak and finally had to release her hold. At least his grandmother had had plenty of money to take care of both herself and her daughter in what was supposedly the nicest assisted living facility in the whole state of Mississippi. Even so, Bruce had nothing good to say about the Magnolia Lane Home. Not that he could have taken care of his mother and grandmother any better than the people there had. And not that he had even offered to try, which had given him plenty to feel guilty about. It was a sad thing that love and guilt were so often tied up together.

  Bruce was at the very back of the lot now, corralling the new leaves and blowing them into the long row of old ones near the alley, where they would all eventually be sucked up by one of the decrepit trucks sent around by the county. After this, the front yard would probably take less than a half hour. Then time to clean up and go upstairs for beef stroganoff with Kimberly and Madison. He wondered if there was another uncle alive who looked forward to spending an evening with his niece as much as he did. He often found it hard not to talk about Maddy too much at church or school, realizing he might sound like one of those bachelors who had no life.

  The thought of beef stroganoff was already making his mouth water, which was a little worrisome. It had begun to occur to him recently that food seemed to be on his mind way too much these days. Back during his tomcatting days, he had liked to eat, like any man, but back then he could take it or leave it. If something more important came along, like a woman, he could skip a meal without thinking twice about it.

  He wouldn’t think of skipping a meal these days. Even though Kimberly kept telling him he looked a lot better now that he wasn’t such a string bean, he knew he needed to take up something aerobic again. Hiking on weekends wasn’t enough to keep in shape.

  As he turned the leaf blower off and started toward the front yard, he noticed that Celia’s car was back on its parking pad already. So much for the tennis tournament idea.

  Maybe he should take up tennis again. He had played a few times in high school and had even made it to the semifinals in a city tournament when he was sixteen. Of course, there were only five boys who signed up for that tournament, and in Kimberly’s version of the story, the other four were on crutches. But the truth was, he used to have a pretty good backhand, actually more consistent than his forehand. Maybe he should inquire at the YMCA and see if they had any kind of local tennis league he could sign up for.

  Then after he got good again, he could challenge Celia and take her down a notch or two. Or very likely he could beat her right now. After all, he was a man, and she was so small. Milton Stewart had told him she was on a team that had won the state championship, which probably meant she was pretty decent, but surely he could beat her just by virtue of his superior power. But here he was, letting his mind get away from him again. No, he would never challenge her, he reminded himself, because he was never planning to talk to her again.

  Cutting between the house and the driveway next door, Bruce suddenly stopped. He turned toward the Stewarts’ house and listened. The sound was coming from Celia’s apartment, and it was something he recognized. A clarinet—he was fairly sure that’s what it was. He wasn’t a musician by any stretch, but his grandmother had always played classical music whenever he had visited her as a child, and he still remembered the recording of Peter and the Wolf, which was one of his favorites. Yes, he was sure what he was hearing now was a clarinet. He noticed that Celia’s kitchen window was open a few inches, the same window they had argued through.

  He suddenly remembered a girl he had taken to a homecoming football game in high school years ago, Deanna or Leanna he thought her name was, who had played clarinet in the band. She had had to go sit with the band during halftime while the homecoming court paraded onto the field to the strains of “The Shadow of Your Smile,” and later he had gotten her to play her part for him in the backseat of his car out by the airstrip, where the smell of burning leaves from somebody’s backyard floated over the empty field. It really didn’t sound much like the song, though, since her part wasn’t the melody.

  He kept listening now. It was a clarinet, no question. Once or twice before, he had heard music coming from an open window of Celia’s apartment, but that was always recorded music and usually something orchestral. This was simple and unadorned, an unaccompanied clarinet solo. Surely it wasn’t the radio or a CD. So was it Celia? Did she play the clarinet? He could see that—former journalist, art lover, perfectionist, tennis player, clarinetist, world-class expert on antisocial behavior. Yes, it all fit.

  And the song she was playing—there was no doubt about that, either. It was a song he had heard a jazz combo play in Vidalia, Louisiana, one summer when he went to visit Marlo Arturo, a girl he thought he had fallen in love with his junior year of college at Jackson State. Turned out he hadn’t, but they’d had a good couple of days together anyway. “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”—that was the song.

  He could still hear the saxophone wailing the melody in that dim little smoky bar on the Mississippi River as Marlo sang the words in her breathy voice and ran her long slim fingers over the scars on his hand. It was a Tommy Dorsey song, she had told him, and Tommy Dorsey and her grandfather had been poker buddies, though Bruce couldn’t be sure about any of it, since he had learned by then that Marlo liked to make up things to impress people. She had also told him that she had gone to an exercise class led by Jane Fonda in person and that she had become close friends with Jimmy Carter’s daughter at a summer camp in high school.

  So anyway, here was that same song all these years later, wafting out of a window from his neighbor’s apartment, evoking a whole host of images, from the spicy scent of burning leaves at an airstrip in Mississippi to the black heavy-lidded eyes of a girl named Marlo in Louisiana. The tune broke off all of a sudden. Afraid that Celia had seen him staring at her open window, Bruce quickly resumed his walk to the front yard. He couldn’t help wondering, though, what had made her stop playing. He wished she hadn’t.

  He wished he could remember all the words to the song. The melody itself was an odd mixture of blues and religion. It had a brooding sultry nightclub sound, yet there was something almost a little desperate in it, something that made you think of someone who was afraid of the dark. He wondered if there was anything Celia was afraid of. Probably not, a self-sufficient little piece of work like her.

  He restarted the leaf blower and tackled the front yard. Within twenty minutes he was finished. It would have been quicker to go around the other side of the house to put the blower away in the garage, but he found himself once more walking on the side by the Stewarts’ driveway, hoping he might hear the clarinet again. When he did, he felt glad and also disgusted with himself for feeling glad.

  Amazingly, it was another song he recognized, this one a gospel song they had sung from the hymnbook he shared with Virgil Dunlop the second time he had gone to church with him about a year ago, the time that wasn’t supposed to happen after the first. It was a song the people at church obviously loved, for they had sung it a number of times since then. “On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,” it started out. By this time Virgil and he had gone around and around about Christianity, about what kind of God it was these people called their “loving and almighty heavenly father” on the one hand, yet who evidently used his love and power very selectively if one read the front page of the newspaper every day.

  “The emblem of suffering and shame”
was another phrase in the song. Bruce remembered looking down at his hands later that night during the preacher’s simple sermon about the Crucifixion. It really hadn’t been that much of a leap for him to believe in a love so strong it was willing to die for someone else. After all, he bore an emblem of suffering on his own scarred hands. Not that his suffering had been for any noble and glorious cause, not at all. It had actually been quite stupid—the wild irrational act of a little boy upon seeing the utility shed on fire and knowing his cat and her new kittens were inside it. He remembered his sister Suzanne standing beside his bed days after the incident, shaking her head in all her teenage superiority and saying, “You almost died for a cat, Brucie.”

  But still, that’s what love meant. That you would let yourself get hurt before someone you loved. “For ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died”—those were the words he heard now as the clarinet tune continued. Strangely enough, it was the thought of Madison, who had not been quite a year old at the time, that had finally hit him so hard that night during the preacher’s sermon about God’s giving his son to die on that old rugged cross.

  Sure, he could imagine laying down his own life for Madison in an instant, but what if somebody asked him to sacrifice Madison’s life in order for some grand purpose to be accomplished? No way in the world would he be able to suffer like that. And you’re not even her father, he thought. You’re only her uncle.

  Yet God had been willing to do this. He had given up his only son to suffer a painful and extended and publicly shameful death for . . . and that’s when it had really struck him. For a whole world of proud, selfish, short-sighted, willful, ignorant sinners like himself.